Eric Angevine

Digging for basketball stories in the offseason is tough sledding. Oddly enough, as the first games draw closer, news gets even harder to find, and the reason is a familiar one for college hoop-heads: football done stole all our candy. Any newspaper that covers college sports extensively is talking kickoff this week, so I’m going…

Minor League baseball games aren’t like their MLB counterparts. Fans know the best players won’t be around long, and the players who do hang around might not be as athletically gifted as the ones who move on up to the big time. In that way, it’s a lot like college hoops. The Rutgers Scarlet Knights…

What a difference a year makes. Logan Baumann, a 6’0″ guard who was serving as team manager, was invited to join the Louisville Cardinals as a walk-on last season when Mike Marra suffered a season-ending injury. He appeared in four games – including mop-up minutes vs. Wichita State – and made the wild ride to the…

Last year, Rick Byrd put together a schedule that gave Belmont some tough tests. According to the Nashville Tennesseean, the Bruins played the No. 2 strength of schedule – traveling to Stanford, VCU and Kansas – and ended up with a top-25 RPI in 2012-13. Pretty impressive, but this year’s slate might be even more…

You’ll never find a college basketball player who relishes the thought of spending a season on the bench. Injuries and coaches decisions will often put a young player out of commission for a season, however. It’s up to the redshirtee to get the most he can out of the experience. Creighton’s redshirt freshman Isaiah Zierden,…

Last year was a major anomaly for the Michigan State Spartans. As Diamond Leung of MLive.com pointed out today, the 2012-2013 season was the first time in a decade that a Tom Izzo-coached team had a negative assist-to-turnover ratio. Leung pointed out that the Spartans matched 489 turnovers with 474 assists. That’s not going to…

Tennessee is getting ready to honor one of its greatest players, and they’ve chosen a big date – the March 1 game when in-state rival Vanderbilt comes to Thompson-Boling – as the perfect time for the ceremony. The Vols will run Dale Ellis’ number 14 jersey to the rafters in front of a rabid, partisan…

College basketball fans are acting like colorful arena floors are a modern invention, with a lineage traced directly from the painted foliage at Oregon’s Matthew Knight Arena to the Life of Pi theme at Florida International. But eye-popping basketball courts were – and doesn’t it seem obvious in retrospect? – a product of the freewheeling 1970s. Right…

There’s a full house in Bloomington this weekend, according to the Indianapolis Star. It seems several of Tom Crean’s top recruiting targets are in town this weekend, taking “unofficial” visits. As informal as these visits might be, they are super-meaningful for the program. Some of the school’s biggest potential future stars will be wandering campus this weekend, according…

New court surfaces are going in fast and furious throughout college basketball. Most of them are wild, eye-busting designs, with each program looking to top the last. One school, however, put in a nice, modest new floor. Boise State’s Taco Bell Arena, of all places, is the home of a relatively mellow, mostly natural-wood-colored court. You…

Following a surprise Final Four run, there’s little doubt that Gregg Marshall and Wichita State are pulling in better players than the school has seen since Xavier McDaniel and Antoine Carr toed the stripe on campus. With big-time recruits come big-time headaches, it seems. Marshall had 6’7″, 240-lb. juco transfer Earl Watson schedule to join the…

I’ll be honest here. I don’t know if the French team Boulogne is any good or not, or how their talent level compares to your average SEC team, but the fact that they play in something called the “B Division” of French hoops doesn’t make them sound terribly impressive. What I do know, thanks to…

It sounds like Kaleb Joseph really wanted to go to Syracuse. According to the Post-Standard, the 2014 guard barely had to set foot on campus before he agreed to don the Orange. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” Joseph told the newspaper. “In the back of my mind it’s always where I wanted to…

The First Four took a little getting used to for those of us who remember when the tourney was a perfectly balanced 64 teams. Even so, the fact that it was hosted at the University of Dayton year-in and year-out helped give it a certain cachet and familiarity. Dayton, of course, would love to keep…

Anyone who loves college basketball is looking forward to seeing what Andrew Wiggins can do in a Kansas uniform. The Canadian import is going to be the sizzle in Allen Fieldhouse for a season at most. But Bill Self’s teams are more often winners because there’s plenty of steak behind the sizzle. Wiggins has been…

Big guard Eric Stafford had the skills to garner an offer from La Salle, a program on the rise coming off of a Sweet 16 appearance. He also had the grades to play for Ivy League schools, but didn’t feel he could afford to pay his own way in the Ancient Eight. The ideal solution…

The Rutgers Athletic Center is getting an upgrade as the school prepares for its close-up as a new member of the Big Ten conference. It’s a rare positive report from the school that has battled North Carolina and the P.J. Hairston mess for “worst off-season news headlines” this year. New AD Julie Hermann, who played…

When James Blackmon, Jr. rescinded his verbal commitment to Indiana, Tom Crean wasted no time looking for a replacement. And, if you’re Indiana, a replacement means one of the most coveted guards in the class of 2014. Per Hoosier-centric blog Inside the Hall, Crean officially offered New Yorker Isaiah Whitehead a scholarship on Friday night.…

NCAA enforcement seems arbitrary and out-of-touch with reality at times. Apparently, interim NCAA enforcement chief Jonathan Duncan has noticed the same thing, and he has a pretty straightforward way of addressing the problem. He’s sending his staff back to campus. Not piecemeal as part of emerging investigations, but in a more collaborative, immersive way designed…

The NCAA loves to tell you how most scholar-athletes “go pro in something else”. For former North Dakota forward Patrick Mitchell, that meant that he went to work for a casino in his native Iowa after a short stint playing basketball in Portugal. His professional sports aspirations seemed to be in the rear-view mirror, until…

Kudos to Maryland head coach Mark Turgeon for finding a way to get Shaquille Cleare home to his native Bahamas this summer. The Terps will begin a week-long exhibition swing through the islands on Monday. Sadly for Cleare, he won’t be able to suit up and actually play in front of his family. It’s especially…

Offseason surgery is a standard thing for athletes. For college basketball players, knees go under the knife most often, with lingering ankle and foot injuries fairly common as well. UConn’s Omar Calhoun has spent four months of his summer overcoming an unusual surgery, however. According to the Hartford Courant, the rising sophomore suffered from something…

Shaka Smart may be one of the best coaches outside of John Calipari at making the scene. He’s one of the hippest young coaches out there, so when he makes an appearance, people take note. With the Washington Redskins taking training camp in Richmond, Smart dropped by to check out this year’s team, and had…

We’ve seen a lot of new basketball floors go in this past offseason, and most of them have been colorful and inventive, to say the least. The latest school to announce that a new court will go in is Marshall, though we don’t know yet what the design will be. Given the school’s unique nickname,…

The Big Ten Network has been immensely profitable to league member schools. According to a recent article by Andy Bitter of the Virginian-Pilot, the network passes along somewhere around $7 million to league schools every year as part of the TV rights deal. It’s important to remember, however, that the BTN is currently the exception…